Week 7: NASA, Etc.

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Tuesday, July 14, 2015

By:

Patrick Mangan

Hello,

To start off this week we went on a tour of the NASA Goddard facility where some of the other interns work. It was a very cool and surreal experience, because we had the privilege of seeing state of the art technology. We saw a gigantic clean room where a space telescope was in the process of being built. We also got to see the actual control room for the Hubble Space Telescope and tour the Hubble building. That was a very cool experience because I remember learning about the Hubble telescope in grade school and seeing pictures in textbooks that it took, and I was able to be right there where it all began.

Also, some of my family came up to visit me this weekend. My mom and my grandparents came up, which was great because I hadn't seen anybody from home since I got here. We walked around and saw all the sights and went to some new restaurants. For instance, we went to a fast-food place called Z-Burger, where if you get a large order of fries, they give you about four potatoes worth. That was a pleasant surprise. My mom and I also got the opportunity to test out a couple of the local Irish pubs. It was nice to enjoy a pint of Guinness with a familiar face after all this time in DC. I even got mistaken for a local at one of them because of my Nationals hat.

For my work, I continued organizing the NGSS performance expectations in a useful way. I feel that once I finish this project, I will have created a great tool that physics teachers in districts that are adopting these standards will find useful in writing lesson plans. The finished product will be something I will be proud of.